One of the most consistent voices in your head is likely to be a self-critical one: you wonder why you worry about even routine things like reading your meter for a utilities bill; you get angry with yourself for getting stressed about a family occasion that’s entirely predictable; you feel inadequate for feeling stressed at work while your colleagues seem to be handling things fine; you feel guilty because actually life is pretty good, but you can’t keep up.

So far we’ve looked at what it really means to be calm. Before we take a look at where you’re at right now and the reasons you feel stressed, we’re going to rewind to what’s led up to now. It’s difficult to deal with how you are at present while the headquarters of your brain have called the emergency fire engine and your head feels like an emergency siren. We’ve outlined that stress is a chemical reaction in the brain, but doubtless your question is: ‘Yeah, but why can’t I stop that happening?’

There are various factors which we’ll address in this chapter. Whatever these factors are, stress has become your default setting. Once you become aware of why and how you can begin to reconfigure your responses.

YOUR EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE SHAPES YOUR BRAIN

Let’s start at the beginning. Whether you always remember feeling anxious as a child, or can pinpoint becoming anxious when there were cutbacks in your current workplace, how we experienced pressure in our earliest years plays a part in how we handle pressure as adults.

“Some people learn earlier 
on in life how to deal with 
life, maybe because of 
their parents, their school, their environment. We 
all have different starting points.”

Ed Halliwell, mindfulness teacher and writer

We know from the pioneering work of psychoanalyst John Bowlby¹ that it’s important for newborn babies to form a strong secure attachment to their mothers. ‘If for whatever reason this doesn’t happen,’ says psychologist and neuroscientist, Professor Ian Robertson, ‘this can lead to anxiety.’

From a neuroscience point of view, the brain of a newborn is affected when bonding with mummy doesn’t happen (because mummy or baby are sick and separated for example). The amygdala (a key part of the brain responsible for emotion) displays differences when anxiety is rooted so early on. ‘The amygdala is particularly active when people are anxious, and so, over many years, this leads to it becoming bigger because its networks of brain cells become more and more strongly connected with repeated use,’ writes Professor Robertson in his latest book, The Stress Test.² In other words, it’s like a muscle getting bigger and stronger with exercise.

Put in very simple language, anxiety might be more than a habit – it might be what your brain kicks into because it’s good at being anxious. Viewing the brain as something like a muscle that can be trained and taking a neuroscience view can not only help you understand why you are the way you are, but it can fuel you with the motivation that it is possible to change. If you’ve always made soggy pasta until you taste real pasta on holiday in Italy, and the cook shows you how to cook it properly, well you won’t look back.

“No human behaviour 
is untrainable or 
unchangeable – NONE.”

Professor Ian Robertson, psychologist and neuroscientist

Our earliest experiences in dealing with uncertainty and problems become the recipes we follow as adults. We learn what to go for and what to avoid based on what we experience. If a teacher told you not to mumble the first time you read something out at assembly, you might have learnt to avoid speaking in public. If the whole school clapped enthusiastically and your teacher told you you’re a natural, then making presentations might be one of your greatest strengths.

As human beings we fall into different behavioural modes based on how we feel. Psychologist Rob Gray³ developed the theory of approach or avoidance. As Professor Robertson explains in his book, a key development in psychology came when Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry Richard Davidson⁴ took Gray’s approach/avoidance systems and applied these to emotional problems. People who are approach-based suffer less anxiety, while those operating more in avoidance mode experience low moods and anxiety. In terms of daily life this means that the more you want to avoid applying for a new job because you’re not confident in interviews, or the more you avoid going to the GP because you’re worried you might be seriously ill, the more you worry and this perpetuates a cycle. You continue to be anxious and this becomes a habit.

The great news is that it’s possible to change.

• Easier said than done: Stop worrying
• Doable right now: Smile and give yourself a gold medal for worrying – and celebrate your new calm training

YOU’VE SOMEHOW KEPT A LID ON THINGS

It can be very confusing and unsettling to sense yourself out of control when you’ve prided yourself on dealing with challenges. You might wonder why you coped well in a far more demanding work environment several years ago or why suddenly you’re a wreck. Even if you’ve always been a worrier, the worrying might not have got in the way in the past, but now it is. If you’ve somehow always kept going, without dwelling on the past and despite uncertainty about the future, why is now so difficult? And isn’t soldiering on being resilient?

Things do add up. That’s the nature of journeying through life and being human. You can keep painting over walls, creating the most flawless of rooms, but at some point you have to strip those walls bare and start again. Sometimes major life events trigger these seismic changes. A parent dies. A marriage breaks up. You lose your job. Your own business doesn’t take off. You get seriously ill. You move. You move more than once in a year. Your flat is flooded and the ceiling falls through. Any major event can blast your usual coping modes out of the window and you find yourself lost in a backdrop of previous disappointments: all the heartbreaks, all the job disappointments, all the friendship betrayals, everything you soldiered through now haunts you. This is a painful place to be in, but it’s normal and it will pass because you are addressing the problem.

• Easier said than done: Move on from the past
• Doable right now: Acknowledge and accept how you feel today

YOU’RE HEADING FOR BURNOUT

When you stop to process your feelings and tackle emotional problems there’s a risk of entering a relentless mental treadmill that eventually will wear you out. If you’re working in an all-hours demanding work culture, are a workaholic, or for whatever reason have to take on more demands than you can handle (health issues plus problems with children plus work pressures, for example) anxiety is your mind’s way of reminding you things are just too much.

Performance psychologist Dr Jim Loehr and Energy coach Tony Schwartz⁷ have written about what we can learn from the relationship between emotions and energy in sports. There are four zones: performance, survival, relaxation and burnout, each with a different interaction between emotions and energy. In performance mode there is high energy and positive emotions, in survival mode there is high energy and negative emotions.

Ideally we want to live our lives in the performance and relaxation zones – not survival and burnout. You know you’re 
in performance mode when you thrive on challenges, you wake up excited and celebrate your achievements with fun downtime. If life feels relentless, however, and you’re too tired to even sleep, that’s a sign to step back and take action to restore yourself.

• Easier said than done: Take on less
• Doable right now: Take a moment to breathe now

YOU FEEL ANGRY, RESENTFUL OR REJECTED

These are three powerful emotions which may be causing you additional feelings of guilt. And that’s a hugely stressful situation to be in. While researching this book, we came across leading California-based anxiety specialist Reneau Z. Peurifoy’s book, Anxiety, Phobias and Panic (Piatkus), which was first published in 1988. A whole chapter in the book is devoted to feeling angry, resentful or rejected. If you identify that these are emotions you feel on a regular basis, it’s a sign that your needs are not met.

Neuroscience confirms that bottling up emotions like anger affects the brain and creates more stress. Professor Robertson writes⁸ that as human beings we have six basic emotions as part of our evolutionary system: fear, surprise, happiness, sadness, disgust, anger all play a part in our survival. ‘Anger’s role is at least partly to get you what you want or need when your goal is thwarted.’

Professor Robertson explains in his book that if someone criticizes us this switches on the left frontal lobe of the brain. If there’s no action, being upset turns into anxiety, which is ‘unfinished business in the mind’. Answering back switches on the right frontal lobe’s approach–reward system. We do something. We feel better. The problem is you can’t shout back at your boss, you can’t blast your team and then expect to motivate them, and if you answer back at friends consistently without processing whether you’re being sensitive or they have a point, you might not have any friends left.

“I’m still training myself to be calm if someone speaks to me aggressively. I find it hard.”

Professor Ian Robertson, psychologist and neuroscientist

The challenge is to cultivate what Professor Robertson refers to as ‘constructive anger’ – using the brain’s approach energy to spell out clearly why you are angry and what you would like them to do about it. ‘Suppressing emotions without reappraising them […] increases adrenaline-linked arousal responses, including raised heart rate, blood pressure and skin sweatiness. It also makes your memory poorer.’⁹

You might wonder how resentment and anger can be in the same category as rejection. If rejection is something you experience regularly, whether it’s job rejection or social rejection, it may be reassuring for you in some way to know that the stress you feel as a result of rejection is not only real, it’s serious. ‘Rejection by others,’ writes Professor Robertson¹⁰ ‘is the biggest stressor known to human kind and there are good reasons for this. In our evolutionary past, being rejected from the group meant you might be killed by enemies or predators. And social rejection makes us feel pain that switches on exactly the same brain networks as physical pain […].’

Whatever the negative emotion is, it won’t go away easily. If you could snap out of it, you would. Enduring situations – like feeling angry with your neighbour who woke you up again, or feeling resentful someone less qualified and less experienced was promoted over you, or feeling rejected after yet another job application – is like being mentally battered. On a practical level what you need might be obvious: peace and quiet, promotion, a job. But your emotional needs may be more complex: to have people around you who value you as a good neighbour and are considerate to your needs, to be appreciated and valued for your contribution to the team, to have an identity you are proud of. Delving into your needs can help you focus on how to resolve your unmet needs, which in turn will take the lid off those simmering and boiling emotions.

• Easier said than done: Get over your anger, resentment, rejection
• Doable right now: Ponder the need triggered by what you feel

UNDERSTANDING WHY YOU’RE AT WHERE YOU ARE

We’ve delved into why you can’t deal well with stress to give you a greater and gentler understanding of yourself so you can move forward without blaming yourself or others and without feeling guilty. Lodged in the recesses of your brain might be your earliest stressful experience: not being able to bond with mummy. And if your parents were experiencing difficult times, you wouldn’t have been able to learn how to cope by mirroring them. Environment counts for half of our personality, so if you had a tricky time at school your coping skills won’t have been developed – though the great news is it’s never too late to learn these skills and change. There is nothing, our expert neuroscientist Professor Robertson confirms, that can’t be changed if you put your mind to it.

There are times when circumstances in the present kick off a crisis, and that could be because of old wounds being triggered and coming up to be healed, or you might have taken on too much and are racing to burnout. If you’re experiencing certain tricky-yucky emotions it’s inevitable that these will keep your mind churning and miserable until you stop feeling guilty and focus on getting your needs met. Whatever the reasons for not being able to handle stress, these reasons are temporary.

If you scored between 20 and 35 …